Oh, lookie here: Metacafe has an exclusive video of the performance of “Basket Case” from Green Day: Rock Band, and they’ve been gracious enough to allow embedding! You can see the whole thing below, but make sure you head over to Metacafe for more video goodness.
[Watch, via @sumboxcar182]
I’m trying not to get too excited about this, because Green Day project lead Chris Foster was pretty clear about not planning to introduce future DLC to Green Day: Rock Band. As far as we know, the game will import the six 21st Century Breakdown DLC tracks, and that’s it.
However…yesterday Game Informer ran an interview with Green Day drummer Tré Cool, and they asked him about the albums included in the game. Here’s his response:
Yeah, there are select songs from other records. We wanted to get stuff from 39/Smooth and Kerplunk! on there, too, but the tapes are really old. I don’t know if you know about analog tapes, but to transfer them you need to play them. They are kind of stuck together right now. You have to “bake” them, and then you have one chance to run it over the machine to transfer it to make stems. Once it hits the head, it comes off the other side shredded. We’re making sure we have the right dudes to do it. We’re actually booking it; there’s one place in Burbank that still does it. We’re going to bite the bullet and shred our old tapes and put it to digital.
OK, so it’s pretty clear that they’re digitizing the old masters. He doesn’t specifically say they’re doing it for the game (or for any game), but that would certainly be one possible outcome of such a project.
Which brings us to the second point:
Q. If you get some of the older tapes baked and get them to digital … do you hope to have timetable for when you can do that stuff as downloadable content?
A. Whenever’s clever, baby.
Now, again, I don’t want to get too excited about this, because let’s face it — for a project like this the band is only tangentially involved in the actual game creation. So band members are not the best sources of info when it comes to specifics about things like DLC or any of the technology behind the game.
But the problem with getting the older albums into the game has always been explained as access to the master recordings. So if those recordings did become available…
If nothing else, it certainly increases the likelihood of getting songs from those albums as DLC in the main store, or in Rock Band 3.
[Read]
GameSpot had a nice long chat with Green Day project lead Chris Foster the other day, and peppered the interview with loads of new gameplay footage. In terms of new gameplay details, there’s not a whole lot that wasn’t covered in my interview with Foster or the preview we got at PAX, but one new point caught my attention:
“We have a full drum trainer; we have our sort of core drum lessons that we developed for Beatles, and those are kind of genre-agnostic. And then we have Tré’s Greatest Hits, a collection of some of his best drumming, including one ferocious solo that was so huge we had to split it into two parts, and each of those is still very intense.”
Neat. I’m looking forward to that.
Like I said, there’s lots of footage in the interview, although most of it is without any of the note tracks. And the one bit of actual hands-on gameplay included in the interview is “East Jesus Nowhere”…which is already available as DLC. And it’s just guitar and bass, so you don’t get to see the harmonies. (Though I suppose this is the first time you’ve seen it played by Green Day.)
Still, it’s a hefty, info-packed interview that’s well worth watching if you’re dying to see more of the game in action. So I’ve gone ahead and embedded it after the break. For you! And if you’d like to take another look at some of the gameplay footage, GameSpot helpfully provided it in the Related Videos section, so hit the Read link if you’d like to see more.
[Read]
MyGamerCard has posted what appears to be the full achievement list for Green Day: Rock Band on the 360, and it looks pretty legit to me, in part because the list is jammed with insidery Green Day references. For example, completing all the drum training lessons earns you the “Frank Edwin Wright III” achievement, which is Tré Cool’s real name; and a harmony achievement is called “Sweet Children” — the original name of the band that later became Green Day.
If you’re the type who likes to discover all these secrets on your own, you definitely won’t want to click through, as some of this could be considered spoilerish. But if you want to plan your attack well in advance of the June 8 release, hit the Read link.
[Read, via RockBandAide]
Want to see more gameplay footage of Green Day: Rock Band? IGN has posted clips from a couple songs that I’ve yet to see in motion on the internets: “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Hitchin’ a Ride.”
Now, these aren’t exactly marquee performances, but don’t be too hard on the players; it sounds like Harmonix reps brought the game by on a preview tour, so it’s not like they had time to sit down and learn the songs. Lord knows I probably would have been plenty embarrassed if someone had shot video of my first hands-on with the game. (Let’s not forget I failed out on drums when playing “Brain Stew/Jaded.” Twice. On Hard.) So be kind.
You can find both videos embedded after the break, or hit the Read link to view them in their original context.
[Read]
Yes, it’s a very Green Day…er, day here today thanks to that embargo expiring and loads of new assets being released unto the world. I was able to squeeze most of the new screens into this morning’s post — but there’s also a brand-new trailer!
The new video shows gameplay footage of three songs, one from each of the game’s three venues. First is “21st Century Breakdown,” showing off the in-game version of the Fox Theater in Oakland. Then we have “Holiday,” from the Milton Keynes National Bowl in the UK. And finally, the video includes a very young-looking Green Day performing “She” at the fictional Warehouse venue.
A couple things to keep an eye out for: The gameplay footage shows a lot of harmony sections, so you can see how they’re a bit more sing-along-y than what we saw in The Beatles. And pay special attention to the character animations; this is the first Rock Band game to feature “linear motion-capture” — essentially, each song features a full-length animation that plays from start to finish, which allows the characters to interact with each other and with the crowd with a complexity not seen in previous Rock Band games. Finally, take note of the level of detail in the venues, especially the ornate Fox Theater seen in the screen grab above. It’s a nice testament to the amount of work that went into to re-creating these environments.
Hit the Continue link to see the video in all its HD glory. Continue reading →
As you no doubt know by now, when I was at PAX I had the exciting opportunity to swing by Harmonix’s office to get some serious hands-on time with Green Day: Rock Band. After a couple hours of dedicated rocking, I got a chance to sit down one-on-one with Project Lead Chris Foster and grill him for more details about the game. We covered a lot of ground, discussing intricacies of gameplay, the possibility of DLC, the reasons for the absence of anything before Dookie, and even a little bit about other single-band games. (That’s what we in the business call “a teaser.” But I can’t mislead you fine people, so I can’t help but tell you that it was a very little bit about other single-band games.)
I have a tendency to ramble in my questions and jump between topics, so I’ve edited the questions for clarity and the order of questions for flow. Beyond that, you’re looking at pretty much our entire conversation. And man, after 10 years in print it still weirds me out to be able to run an interview from start to finish. I keep wanting to trim for space. But look! It’s the internet! Space is free!
Anyway, shall we begin? Let’s.
To me, this looked pretty much like The Beatles in terms of actual gameplay mechanics. Is there anything you’re doing that’s new in terms of gameplay that may not be obvious?
I think the main thing in terms of core gameplay is reuniting Beatles’ vocal harmonies with the Rock Band 2 features that were removed from Beatles: drum fills, guitar effects, and whammy bars. We considered big rock endings and tambourine phrases, and we would have put them in, but for the music that we were doing, there weren’t really places where they fit in, so we didn’t need them.
Once of the nice tweaks is that when you bring in the DLC we actually add harmonies onto them, which is a nice way to embellish the Rock Band 2 songs that people have, and it’s something that’s unique to playing them inside of here. The “meta-game” — what we call all the progression mechanics — uses some of the same concepts from Beatles, but it’s been nicely refined. We really wanted to make it appropriate to Green Day, so it’s got three tours instead of the one narrative progression; it’s got collectibles, but they’re arranged in a different way; it has more opportunities to give you cool archival footage.
And one nerdy detail: The challenges in this, in addition to not just being repeats of chapters, we’ve also tuned the difficulty so that you have to average about four and a half stars or four stars a song in order to beat the challenges. One of the things with Beatles, people were like, “I want to get the last photo, but if I blow one song then I have to start over.” So we wanted to make it a little more of a realistic challenge. Continue reading →
